Contemporary contestations of truth have led some to diagnose our age as one of “post-truth”. Seeking a philosophical and moral anchor amid the struggle over what truth is and what it does, some US liberal intellectuals have turned to the legacy of Eastern European dissent. The Czech dissident Václav Havel’s dictum to “live in truth” as a way of defending oneself against omnipresent “communist lies” is being transposed to the world of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Havel’s devotion to truth, we are told, is a much needed remedy at a time when politicians lie and scientists are losing public trust.

This talk will show, however, that this supposed legacy of East European liberal dissent has little to do with how the anti-socialist opposition actually dealt with truth in a liberal political regime. Focusing on Czechia in the 1990s, it will explore the disputes between the former dissidents, who preached the coming of a postmodern era after the fall of a “modern” socialist regime, and sceptical scientists, who were alarmed by what they saw as the rise of “esotericism” and “pseudo-science”. While this story of a conflict between postmodernists and rationalists is unlikely to serve as a moral tale for today, it can help us move from an abstract dissident “legacy” to a history of the postsocialist transformation and its political epistemology.